This week’s topic is directly in my realm of interest. Being a student of the social sciences, I gravitate toward better understanding the social nuances of climate risk. Fortunately, I was able to find a great article to look at through the lens of this week’s topic. This article thoroughly discusses the 3 aspects of vulnerability — exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

Mozambique, a low-income country on the east coast of southern Africa, is being confronted with many of the same dilemmas being faced by other areas of the world. Like many other areas, the city of Beira, Mozambique is “in a race against time to protect itself from cyclones, floods and rising sea-water levels”. This article highlights the fact that climate change will increase the severity of cyclones and flooding, increasing the level of exposure for the population of Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries.

In particular, the article explains that the population of Beira, which has more than 500,000, is largely illiterate and in poverty, which are two of the major socioeconomic features that effectively increase sensitivity and reduce adaptive capacity. These dimensions of vulnerability are also largely influenced by the demographic burden of the youthful population, as was highlighted in our materials this week.

The article also mentions the high rates of disease in Mozambique. Diseases like malaria and cholera are a physical and economic detriment to the population in Mozambique and add to the sum of many factors precipitating vulnerability to significant damage from coastal damage.

However, it is not just the demographic and health profile that predisposes Mozambique to increased damage from coastal decline. The infrastructure of sanitation and non-sanitation-related water is quickly decomposing. For example, the Chiveve tidal river, built in the 1960s, is described as a “big mistake of the past”. The city of Beira is now putting up a flood barrier to protect against storm surges and leaders hope that future development with prove to be sustainable and supportive of a young and growing population.

For a city like Beira, which was built for around 100,000 people and whose population density is ever-growing, conventional methods of population density surveying do not suffice. The basic infrastructure, which does not include widespread electricity, does not speak to researchers who study night light. It is for this reason that it is important that researchers look beyond overly-simplistic means of determining risk and vulnerability. I look forward to delving further into my studies of coastal population vulnerability, especially in the African context.

 

References:

http://news.trust.org/item/20160708105817-a0kuz